Oddball History: When You Could Spend The Night In Coney Island’s Elephant Hotel (VIDEO)
Gaudy amusement attractions have always been a Coney Island hallmark, but none have topped the strange (and sometimes raunchy) legacy left by the park’s 200-foot-tall elephant-shaped hotel.
The Elephantine Colossus, built in 1885, reigned over Coney Island for almost 12 years, standing proudly as a tourist hotel, museum, observatory, and even a brothel, according to historians.
Dubbed by sycophants as “the Eighth Wonder of the World”, Colossus towered above the park at 12 stories tall; a wooden structure encased in a tin skin with curving tusks and a massive howdah. Its body measured 109 feet, and its ears alone were 40 feet wide. (Size accounts vary slightly).
To enter the great beast, a guest would walk in through the main door at the toes to browse the tobacco shop and diorama, then wind up a spiral staircase that ran through its hind legs — each 60 feet around.
From there, you could tour 31 different organ-themed rooms including a concert hall in its belly. It was also a spectacle from the outside looking in: “At night, beacons shone out of the four-foot-tall eyes,” writes David W. McCullough in Brooklyn … and How It Got That Way, (1983).
But no tour would be complete without pausing at the height of the elephant’s back; an observatory where visitors could gaze out onto the scenic skyline — presumably, as the beast stomps away.
Here’s a New York Times exerpt from a first expedition into the building in May, 1885:
“The ‘Stomach Room’ … is 60 by 35 feet and trinagular in shape. From the stomach room the explorers walked through the elphant’s diaphragm and along his liver up into his left lung, where a museum is to be situated during the summer. Then the course was from the lung into the ‘Shoulder Room, then up the ‘Cheek Room, where they looked through the elephant’s right eye out onto the ocean.”
The elephant earned its reputation from many angles — first as a welcome banner for immigrants entering the New York Harbor (before the Statue of Liberty, it was the first visible man-made landmark), and lastly an eyesore of debauchery as the hotel devolved into a seedy, carnival-esque brothel.
Not long after, the tourism thrill was gone and parents wouldn’t be caught dead asking their kids if they wanted to ‘see the elephant’, which became common parlance for picking up prostitutes, said the New York Historical Society.
Finally, in September 1896, a roaring blaze tore into the guts of the seedy beast. The wooden elephant was devoured and razed to ashes, only eight years before Topsy would pick up the park’s reputation for grizzly elephant deaths.
Colossus may be gone, but she’s not forgotten. You can still tour the organ rooms inside a giant elephant by visiting her ‘cousin’ Lucy the Elephant, which is still standing tall — if not proud — on the Jersey shore. Both elephants were the brainchild of Irish-American inventor James Lafferty.
